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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23102764">keep shining right beside me, follow where i go</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn'>eynn</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>i can't go back and lose it all [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Fix-It, Found Family, Gen, Nobody Dies, a different kind of sith i guess?, everyone's a sith! if they try to make a new sith order it's gonna be the size of a planet, in my head i call this universe 'the one where people actually give a shit about someone else', so this is the sith side of becoming . . ., so this is what i think would have happened if the sith hadn't been as selfish</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 14:00:32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,388</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23102764</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Yan Dooku sits in his chair and ponders his life. How did it get so awful?<br/>Maul sits alone on Lotho Minor, lost in his memories.<br/>Asajj Ventress stays with her Master.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>i can't go back and lose it all [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1658362</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1264</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>keep shining right beside me, follow where i go</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceShipMint/gifts">SpaceShipMint</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>this is entirely spaceshipmint's fault. we were talking on the group chat and they set my brain going again.</p><p>also, i spelled 'dooku' as 'dooky' EVERY TIME AARGH</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Yan Dooku sits in his chair and ponders his life.</p><p>When did it become so awful?</p><p>He’s just been ordered to kill his apprentice. His dear Asajj. He loves her as the daughter he could never have. She’s bright and loyal and eager to learn. She keeps him going.</p><p>True, sometimes she fails to complete the missions he gives her, but doesn’t everyone fail once in a while? Nobody can be perfect, not even his grandpadawan Obi-Wan, even though the boy tries so hard.</p><p>Dooku gets lost in the throes of wondering where he went wrong with Qui-Gon, how he could have raised a man to be the kind of person who unconsciously gave his padawans such fears of disappointing him, before he remembers the original problem.</p><p>Asajj.</p><p>Or, rather, Sidious.</p><p>Hmm.</p><p>There’s two ways to look at every problem.</p><p>For a while he considers following the orders he’s received. He can always find another apprentice, and love them as he does Asajj. It’d be a lot of work, and time, and effort, but he could do it.</p><p>But they wouldn’t be her. No one would ever be.</p><p>So that means the problem isn’t himself, or Asajj. The problem is Darth Sidious and his grasping, greedy, cunning, manipulative, torturous, sadistic, flat-out-evil ways.</p><p>Dooku laughs humorlessly. Of course Sidious is evil. He’s Sith.</p><p><em>But you’re Sith, and you don’t want to make people miserable just to enjoy their pain</em>, a tiny voice whispers inside his mind. <em>You Fell because you felt too much and too keenly. You couldn’t bear the hypocrisy of the Order anymore, and so you left. You became Sith because you didn’t know what else you could be, and now you’re in too deep.</em></p><p>Dooku nods, his mind made up.</p><p>He quietly grabs his emergency bag and wipes all the information from the databanks of his stronghold. He collapses it behind him as he leaves. There will be no survivors, nothing anyone can extract from the droids who served him.</p><p>It’s time to call Asajj on the secret and secure comm nobody knows about but the two of them, and for them to get the hell out of the war.</p><p>~</p><p>Maul sits alone on Lotho Minor, lost in his memories. In the first days he had spent there, he had been filled with anger and hate. Towards Kenobi, for taking his legs, towards Jinn, for not dying right away, towards Sidious, for taking his memories and his life.</p><p>His hated for Sidious had won out. What were legs compared to a life?</p><p>He can remember them now, Savage and Feral. He can’t remember his own name, and by now is resigned to never knowing. But he remembers his brothers, and he burns to get back to them. Are they still alive? Are they in danger? Have the Nightsisters taken them? Do they remember him? Do they miss him?</p><p>He misses them.</p><p>Darth Maul gets up. He needs to get off this dump, get back to Dathomir. He needs to find his baby brothers. He wants to go home.</p><p>~</p><p>Asajj Ventress stays with her Master. They creep from bolthole to bolthole, living like refugees.</p><p>He’s told her what happened. She’s disappointed but not surprised that Darth Sidious thought she was a waste of time and resources.</p><p>She’s more shocked that her Master stood up for her. If he’d followed his instructions, she would have turned against him with all the strength and skill she had. She doubts he could have actually killed her in person, so she’s confident she would have escaped whatever trap he’d set for her.</p><p>But he didn’t; he’s gone rogue and she’s the only person in the whole universe he’s trusted enough to take with him.</p><p>Asajj settles back into the pilot’s chair of their tiny beat-up ship and smiles. She’s happy to be Dooku’s apprentice, and she’ll go where he goes.</p><p>She never cared much about the politics of the war anyway, and the cute Jedi with the fascinating Darkness in his soul that keeps coming to her for information and, she thinks, maybe even company, is more important to her than ideals and grand gestures.</p><p>She still hates Kenobi though. She’s had to look at holos of him. When he was a padawan. Her Master is insisting he’s her . . . her cousin. Disgusting.</p><p>When she runs into him again, she won’t kill him, because it’ll upset her Master, but she will do her best to beat the shit out of him. Isn’t that what cousins are for?</p><p>~</p><p>It takes a while for Maul to get Feral and Savage to recognize and remember him, but they do soon enough.</p><p>They hear rumors of the Nightsisters trying to get revenge on Count Dooku for some betrayal, and they flee the day before one of them comes to take a Nightbrother to become their slave.</p><p>They wander the galaxy, avoiding Republic and Separatist fleets alike, staying out of the conflict, keeping their heads down. Maul trains his brothers in the Force, and they pick it up quickly.</p><p>Savage takes to combat training like a natural, and wields a saberstaff with terrifying skill for his size. He can Force choke with precise control after almost no practice at all.</p><p>Feral, unsurprisingly, is better with long-range weapons. He’s sneaky and stealthy and built like an acrobat, and can do a good job with smaller sabers, but he prefers to be at a distance. He also takes to Force healing, and reads and learns everything he can dig up about it.</p><p>Being in the company of his brothers soothes Maul’s cracked mind, and he finds that his quest for revenge drains away slowly, day by day. He still dislikes Kenobi, the bastard, and he will never stop hating and fearing Sidious.</p><p>He won’t throw everything away for a chance to duel Kenobi now, though, and he’ll plan and make backup plans before he goes after Sidious.</p><p>He’s got a reason to live now, two of them, and only one reason to die.</p><p>~</p><p>It takes a long, long time, but eventually they run into each other on a deserted planet far out in the Outer Rim.</p><p>There’s a standoff for a few moments, but then the Count drops his lightsaber and holds out his hand.</p><p>“Peace, Darth Maul,” he says. “I want revenge on Sidious. May I assume you want the same?”</p><p>Maul nods. “I have my brothers, and I need nothing else,” he growls, still wary. “But I want Sidious dead. I will be no one’s slave.”</p><p>“Then we are in agreement,” said Dooku, and the Force hums around them, reassuring them of the truth in the other’s statements.</p><p>Two ships, battered and falling apart, land on the surface of the planet, but only one, patched up and repaired, leaves.</p><p>“I have a contact that may be sympathetic to us in the Jedi Order,” says Asajj, after they’ve come to know each other a little better. “If we want to take down Sidious, we could use them to do it. After all, they live right on top of him.”</p><p>“That’s – actually a good idea,” says Maul, biting back the instinctive anger at the thought of not squeezing the life out of Sidious with his bare hands.</p><p>“How have they lived so close to him for so long without clashing?” Feral asks.</p><p>“They don’t know who he is,” Dooku answers.</p><p>He finds four sets of eyes fixed on him, and four faces with various expressions of incredulity.</p><p>“They don’t kriffing know?” Savage says.</p><p>He’s interrupted in a tirade against the stupidity of the Jedi Order by Asajj’s comm beeping insistently.</p><p>She answers it, and a tinny voice, breathless, begins speaking very quickly.</p><p>“The Chancellor’s ordered the execution of all Jedi, but I think he meant all Force-sensitives,” Jedi Knight Quinlan Vos says across hyperspace. “Get clear of any clones, Asajj. I mean it. Stay away from them until we figure this out, and don’t look for me. They’re resisting it for now but we might not be successful. I’ll see you when this is over.”</p><p>His voice fades out for a moment and then comes back. “Oh yeah, if you want to do something, research Executive Order 66 for us, would you? That would be really helpful.”</p><p>The transmission dies.</p><p>“Looks like they know now,” Maul says.</p><p>Dooku laughs.</p>
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